WUT

Jelinek
has used the fatal attacks in Paris as impetus for her new play “Wut”
(Rage). Her work deals with those fatal assaults on eight members of
the editorial team of the satirical magazine
“Charlie
Hebdo”, two police officers and four customers of a supermarket
selling kosher food in the eastern part of the city. Her text
unleashes the rage which may have generated the attacks. That rage
which in a grandiose, narcissistic self-empowerment sweeps away all
doubts and any powerlessness with the cry “This is our moment now!
You had your time, now our time has come! Look here and die!”

As
usual Jelinek layers her levels of meaning. She refrains from getting
bogged down in the blind rage of Islamist terrorists. Instead we
experience a polyphonic choir of rage. It comprises the voices of
enraged German citizens as well as those of other “upright”,
“awakening” Europeans and even the fury of the antique hero
Heracles who, dazzled by the goddess Hera, extinguishes his own
family in his delusion. Also the author’s own rage intermingles.
Her rage against those who are powerless in the presence of the
terror of rage, the rage against the rage dealers, the populists and
demagogues, the rage against those who are hungry for and addicted to
rage, the rage against her own inability to grasp the indescribable
in her writing, her inability to make it comprehensible. But, can
rage only be understood as driver for destruction? How can it be
shared, how can it unite those who have been excluded or left behind,
without excluding others? What could emerge from the rage? “Wut”
is the
eighth
production of the self-selected artistic cooperative
of
Elfriede Jelinek and Nicolas Stemann, in-house director at the
Kammerspiele. This team looks back on a long history; in Munich,
where they have yet to appear together, they will now continue their
collaboration.